Walking past,
wide berth I give you —
anonymous in work, you semaphore:
snazzle snazzle fizzle crackle
a blue monsoon
aceteline arc —
faceless brown god of storms you linger
in vestment hazard gear and curls of fog
as I continue
up the steaming sidewalk
past the hot-oil clank and tang of the machine shop
beneath the raucous gaze
of two crows who haunt the campus.

[Shirl Sazynski writes scenarios and scripts for VietheGame.com. She received an honorable mention for poetry in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. Her poems, articles, illustrations and comics have appeared in literary journals, magazines and newspapers across the US. She has found the New Mexico desert preserves many remarkable things — including pagan beliefs and traditions now mostly gone from the Western world. Please visit her site.]